Your British colleague is upset. He follows the numbers and figures and he is increasingly worried. He said that the financial crisis is no fleeting problem. It will take years to resolve, even if the solution is serious. He scans the newspaper and he is struck by news of bankruptcies, soaring unemployment, further belt-tightening by the government and spending cuts. He said that the hordes of unemployed people will swell, and this will have many dire economic, social and political costs.

Had the option of the United States and its partners been an eventual war on Iran, the diplomacy, the sanctions, the electronic war against the nuclear facilities and the assassination of the Iranian scientists would not have been extended for that long. Had war been so easy, the Republic’s opponents would not have shown reluctance for years, knowing that even the administration of George Bush Jr. did not dare undertake such an adventure.

It would be easy to place Khaled Mashal’s desire to step down from the leadership of the Hamas movement within the framework of the contagion of democracy that is currently infecting the Arab World, and particularly Islamists movements in it, of which the Hamas movement is considered the most cherished child.

If the Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has in his mind the geo-strategic site of his country and of Morocco in Europe and Africa on the basis of the geographic neighborhood, then this will revive the hopes in re-launching the project of the continental linkage through Gibraltar, which might restore a cohesion that the two continents have lost throughout history.

It is no longer a secret that political division in our region, between “Defiance” and “Resistance” on the one hand, and the “Arab Spring” on the other, has come to correspond to sectarian division. Indeed, after years of glorifying Defiance and Resistance, Islamist political parties of Sunni affiliation, and most prominently the Muslim Brotherhood, have ended up directing criticism at the negative stance taken by those who raise these two slogans, most prominently Iran and Syria, as well as their allies, Hezbollah in particular.

Iranian threats of closing down the Strait of Hormuz, and of a subsequent interruption of Gulf oil supplies to the global markers, are still reverberating, along with Washington’s response that it would not allow this to happen, with U.S. battleships being dispatched to the Gulf in anticipation. However, what is striking in this crisis is that prices have remained stable at the level of 110$ per barrel of Brent crude, despite all these threats.

Around mid-January, an Israeli university professor was barred from accepting an award granted to her by the Israeli Ministry of Health, because women were not permitted on stage during the ceremony, and a male colleague was asked to accept the award on her behalf instead.

Dr. Channa Maayan was placed in a corner with her husband, because the ultra-Orthodox Jews insist on the segregation of men and women. But if this is the lot of Israeli women, then what hope do Arab women have in achieving equality?

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has put a stop to predictions about the possibility of Moscow changing its stance on the Syrian crisis, and warned both Western and Arab countries against intervening militarily under the slogan of “protecting civilians”, as took place in Kosovo and in Libya, considering Syria to be a “red line”.

Mistaken are those who demand that power be handed over to the Islamists in the Arab region of change, even on the grounds that they have been brought to power by a democratic process that must be honored, and that there is no choice but to submit to the de facto situation until the Islamists are tested in power. This is because democracy has been abortive as a result of excluding women and the youths from decision-making, and there are dangerous indications that the personal freedoms of Arab women and religious minorities are being undermined in the age of the Islamist monopoly of power.

Lebanon’s speaker of Parliament, Nabih Berri, was proud to say that he had a role, along with the president of the Republic, Michel Sleiman, and the prime minister, Najib Mikati, in adopting a policy of disassociating Lebanon from “the evils and repercussions of what is taking place in the region.” By this Berri was referring to, naturally, the Syrian crisis.